Yes, All Kids Should Get Trophies

In The Blood of Olympus, which is currently the best-selling book in the U.S., a group of modern-day demigods try to save the world from warring Greek and Roman immortals. The way my 14-year-old daughter described the plot, it sounds fantastically complicated. But there was one part I got right away:

Nike, the winged goddess of victory, sets four of the main characters against each other. She wants them to fight until just one is left standing. The others, she promises, will be happy they died gloriously.

When they try to convince her that everyone loses if they go to war, she freaks out. “There is always a winner!” she screams. “One winner! Everyone else is a loser! Otherwise, victory is meaningless!”

That leads the goddess to a rant about participation trophies, which is funny because she’s talking about soldiers shaking hands and saying “good game” instead of killing each other.

But her basic thought—people shouldn’t be rewarded just for showing up—is one I see echoed regularly on social media. Inevitably, the thought is expressed by a guy who, I would guess, was the biggest, strongest, most badass kid growing up. He didn’t need participation trophies because he was almost always the best at whatever sport he played. And now he objects to the idea that anyone who isn’t the best gets rewarded.

He’s hardly alone. A recent poll commissioned by Reason, a libertarian magazine, found that 57 percent of Americans agree: no championship, no trophy. The people most likely to think this way are white, college-educated, affluent, and politically conservative.

The poll echoes a study published last year in Psychological Science, which found that upper-income men with the most upper-body strength favored winner-take-all economic policies.

In other words, the people who are winners in life believe recognition should only go to winners. We shouldn’t coddle the losers with rewards they haven’t earned.

Let’s start there, with earned and unearned rewards.

The loneliest trophy in the world

In my entire life, I’ve been awarded just one trophy. It’s a little bronze dude who stands five and a half inches tall, on a base that’s about 14 inches square. I got it for playing varsity football at a small high school in rural Missouri. I was an unlikely football player, but because they needed bodies, it was the only sport that didn’t make cuts. Even by that standard I barely qualified. I hurt my shoulder on my first tackle in my first game, and it’s bothered me ever since—42 years and counting.

But I hung in there for the next three years, and at the end I got the trophy. You can call it a participation award if you want. But I think I earned it.

That trophy is dwarfed by one I ended up with by accident. A few years ago, I volunteered to coach soccer in a local rec league after my daughter was cut from her travel team. We ended up with a really good group of players and won most of our games, including a handful of blowouts.

A couple of the girls had never played before. One, I remember, showed up for the first practice with a pair of shoes she’d just pulled out of the box. She was actually a pretty good athlete. The other girl wasn’t. So I made a rule for the blowout wins: If we were ahead early in the game, nobody could shoot again until someone on the team had scored her first goal.

That gave the best players an incentive to help the others, and by the end of the season everyone had scored at least once. Each time a kid scored her first goal, you could see a difference. She stood a little straighter, ran a little harder. For perhaps the first time in her life, she felt like an athlete.

In one of those games, we were awarded a penalty kick. I called for my best player to take the shot, and from the sidelines I gestured that I wanted her to hit the goalie in the chest. Kick it right at her, and let her stop it.

Because she was also one of the smartest kids on the team, she figured out what I meant. She ran up to the ball like she was going to blast it, but took something off and hit it straight at the goalie, who of course caught it.

It was probably the only shot that girl stopped all day, and her teammates and their parents cheered. Once again, I could see something change. That girl, in that minute, felt good about herself.

The assistant coaches and I gave the girls trophies at the end of the season, even though the league had no official championship that they could’ve won. The kids and parents enjoyed the season, and it seemed like a fitting way to cap it off. (I ended up with the trophy we bought for a girl who didn’t show up for the final game.)

Technically, they were participation awards. But participation wasn’t easy. We made the kids work. Nobody left a practice without sweating. Nobody finished a game without grass stains on her uniform. By the end of the season they were all in better shape, with better skills.

If receiving those awards stunted their development, I have yet to see any sign of it. The best player won a national championship in a high school fitness competition last spring. Some of the others are stars in music and academics.

But of course that’s just one story of one group of kids I happened to know for a few months. So let’s talk about a different kind of participation trophy, the kind most of us receive without thinking about it.

The lucky cul-de-sac club

If you were born into a middle-class family, as I was, you probably grew up in safe neighborhoods and went to good schools. You didn’t do anything to earn those premiums; they just happened, and you accepted them without giving any thought to those who weren’t so lucky.

That initial benefit, it turns out, will follow you through life. Studies have shown that kids from the most affluent families finish high school with the best SAT scores. Same with kids whose parents have the most education. Those who start with the most advantages end up with the most opportunities.

Nobody’s saying we should take anything away from those kids just because they got a little lucky at birth. The most successful ones still work hard to earn good grades and take advantage of their opportunities.

But there’s also a nonzero chance that many of them got unearned rewards along the way. Take the star football player who got passing grades from teachers to make sure he stayed eligible. It’s no stretch to picture an athlete whose high school diploma is the biggest participation trophy of all.

Same with every kid who ever got into an elite school because his parents went there, or landed a good job because of family connections, or got off with a warning from the police because he’s white and lives in a nice neighborhood.

That brings us back to the fictional world of my daughter’s favorite book. The young demigods are at the mercy of Nike, the goddess of “two men enter, one man leaves,” who wants them to fight to the death. But by pretending to fight each other, they trick the goddess, neutralize her power, and take her hostage. Then, my daughter assures me, they go on to save the world from a conflict that would leave half of them dead and all of them worse off.

The book was written for kids, but I think it holds a lesson for all of us:

We sneer at inexpensive trophies given to children who show up and play hard on rec-league teams, but we don’t think twice about the far more valuable perks that come with being born halfway to the finish line.

Because when it comes right down to it, the only participation awards we don’t like are the ones that go to someone else.

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